rkmen, the glass-painters of Chartres or Le Mans. What is
called the Renaissance in France is thus not so much the introduction of
a wholly new taste ready-made from Italy, but rather the finest and
subtlest phase of the middle age itself, its last fleeting splendour and
temperate Saint Martin's summer. In poetry, the Gothic spirit in France
had produced a thousand songs; and in the Renaissance, French poetry too
did but borrow something to blend with a native growth, and the poems of
Ronsard, with their ingenuity, their delicately figured surfaces, their
slightness, their fanciful combinations of rhyme, are but the
correlative of the traceries of the house of Jacques Coeur at Bourges,
or the Maison de Justice at Rouen.

There was indeed something in the native French taste naturally akin to
that Italian finesse. The characteristic of French work had always been
a certain nicety, a remarkable daintiness of hand, une nettete
remarquable d'execution. In the paintings of Francois Clouet, for
example, or rather of the Clouets--for there was a whole family of
them--painters remarkable for their resistance to Italian influences,
there is a silveriness of colour and a clearness of expression which
distinguish them very definitely from their Flemish neighbours, Hemling
or the Van Eycks. And this nicety is not less characteristic of old
French poetry. A light, aerial delicacy, a simple elegance--une nettete
remarquable d'execution:--these are essential characteristics alike of
Villon's poetry, and of the Hours of Anne of Brittany. They are
characteristic too of a hundred French Gothic carvings and traceries.
Alike in the old Gothic cathedrals, and in their counterpart, the old
Gothic chansons de geste, the rough and ponderous mass becomes, as if by
passing for a moment into happier conditions, or through a more gracious
stratum of air, graceful and refined, like the carved ferneries on the
granite church at Folgoat, or the lines which describe the fair priestly
hands of Archbishop Turpin, in the song of Roland; although below both
alike there is a fund of mere Gothic strength, or heaviness.*

*The purely artistic aspects of this subject have been interpreted, in a
work of great taste and learning, by Mrs. Mark Pattison:--The
Renaissance of Art in France.

And Villon's songs and Clouet's paintings are like these. It is the
higher touch making itself felt here and there, betraying itself, like
nobler blood in a lower stock, by a